We want to send you one of our five galleys of Hugo & Rose by Bridget Foley, out on May 5th from St. Martin's Press!

After a childhood accident, Rose's dreams take her to a wondrous island fraught with adventure. On this island, she has never been alone: she shares it with Hugo, a brave boy who's grown up with her into a hero of a man.

But when Rose stumbles across Hugo in real life, both her real and dream worlds are changed forever. Here is the man who has shared all of her incredible adventures in impossible places, who grew up with her, even if they aren't what either one imagined. Their chance encounter begins a cascade of questions, lies, and a dangerous obsession that threatens to topple everything she knows.

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The new Hawkeye action figure, based on Matt Fraction and David Aja’s take on the Avengers, comes with trick arrows, a patched-up face, and lots of articulation. But none of that is as amazing as PIZZA DOG. Yes, Clint comes with his trusted pup Lucky, the star of one of the best Hawkeye comics—and, really, one of the best single-issue comics of 2013. Lookit how Toyark posed Hawkguy and Pizza Dog!

Afternoon Roundup brings you Margaret Atwood’s favorite thing about Game of Thrones, a Jules Verne musical, and a new perspective on Link.

Late last year, Alan Moore, author of the 1996 novel Voice of the Fire (amongst a number of other things) finally finished the first draft of his second prose piece: an expansive speculative study of his hometown of Northampton.

You must be wondering why it took him so gosh-darned long. Well, Leah Moore—who kept fans apprised of her father’s progress on Facebook—explained that it ran “to more than a million words in draft form.” A nonsense number without proper context, so let me make sense of the insensible: Jerusalem is bigger than the Bible, and fully twice the length of War and Peace.

Welcome back to the reread of Mistress of the Empire by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts! This one's going to be emotional. Damn those repressed Tsurani. Pack hankies!

Chapter 2: Confrontation

SUMMARY: Can we please refrain from murdering any more children in this chapter? Kthnxbye.

Jiro plays shah, which is chess. I’m hoping that this is the authors telling us through symbolism that as far as being Mara’s nemesis goes, he is more about calm strategy and less about the bloodsports and human sacrifice. Because seriously, I can’t take another Desio or Tasaio.

M.R. Carey will adapt his 2014 novel The Girl with All the Gifts for film, The Hollywood Reporter announced today. Retitled as She Who Brings Gifts, the movie will star Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton, and Paddy Considine, and will be directed by Colm McCarthy (Sherlock, Doctor Who).

These stars will likely play the three central adult roles in the film: We’re assuming Arterton is idealistic young teacher Miss Justineau, who must teach special children in the wake of a worldwide fungal infection; Considine will bring the muscle as Sergeant Ed Parks, terrified and disgusted by his charges; and Close must be Doctor Caroline Caldwell, who will sacrifice as many test subjects as she needs to in order to find a cure.

To me, The Tempest has always been Shakespeare’s most intriguing play, the one most open to interpretation and contemporary update. It is also one of the most difficult Shakespearean works to stage, from its stormy, chaotic first scene to its ethereal masque to its ambiguous resolution, with Prospero facing his silent, treacherous brother and renouncing the power that has made every action in the story possible.

Advances in theater technology mean that directors can now stage The Tempest as everything from grandiose spectacle to minimalist dreamscape, but the slippery, potent language remains the central force and mystery of this fathomless play.

To be honest, I didn’t have high hopes for Insurgent, the second movie in the Divergent trilogy based on Veronica Roth’s dystopian YA novels. The massive book was bogged down in Tris Prior’s self-loathing and self-sabotage, serving mostly as a link between the faction system in Divergent and the big, game-changing reveal that leads to Allegiant.

In the wake of Erudite (the intelligent faction, led by Kate Winslet as the faction-upholding Jeanine Matthews) enslaving the Dauntless army and using them to destroy selfless Abnegation, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), Four (Theo James), and Peter (Miles Teller, having way too much fun with his role) are fugitives on the run, looking for shelter and allies in the other factions, which just want to protect themselves from more fracturing.

However, like the Hunger Games adaptations, Insurgent the movie manages to stand apart from its source material, with a leaner plot and clearer stakes. While some plot points are dispensed of and some of the nuance lost, Insurgent makes fascinating commentary on generational divides and clinging to the old ways, better depicting the breakdown of a dystopian society.

The cover of Magic’s Promise features Vanyel in Heraldic uniform. A tasteful quantity of chains is highlighting an aesthetically appropriate expanse of his chest. Behind him, a child with a terrible perm clings to a Companion with slash-marks on its flank. Something is burning. The back cover has bat-like creatures with huge teeth.

There are peaches.

Everything about this cover says I’m going to have a lot of fun with this book, right up until the moment it punches me in the heart.

In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to recommend five books based around a common theme. These lists aren’t intended to be exhaustive, so we hope you’ll discuss and add your own suggestions in the comments!

I adore a good animal sidekick. An animal sidekick illuminates so much about the character it’s decided to assist—what she loves, fears, and needs to protect. That almost-mystical connection with an animal accomplice is neatly encapsulated in the idea of a familiar—a helpful spirit that is never entirely under the control of the protagonist. An animal always has a mind of its own, and will never strictly follow the orders of its human companion.

In an America of the semi-distant future, human knowledge has reverted to a pre-Copernican state. Science and religion are diminished to fairy tales, and Earth once again occupies the lonely center of the universe, the stars and planets mere etchings on the glass globe that encases it. But when an ancient bunker containing a perfectly preserved space vehicle is discovered beneath the ruins of Cape Canaveral, it has the power to turn this retrograde world inside out.

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Next year will see a new installment in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning Vorkosigan Saga! Bujold recently announced on her Goodreads blog that her new novel Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen will be published in February of 2016 (tentatively) from Baen Books.

In a bit of great timing, 2016 will also mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Bujold’s first three Vorkosigan Saga novels: Shards of Honor, The Warrior’s Apprentice, and Ethan of Athos.

A School for Unusual Girls by Kathleen Baldwin, the first installment in the Stranje House series, comes out from Tor Books on May 19th, and we want to send you a galley right now!

It's 1814. Napoleon is exiled on Elba. Europe is in shambles. Britain is at war on four fronts. And Stranje House, a School for Unusual Girls, has become one of Regency England's dark little secrets. The daughters of the beau monde who don't fit high society's constrictive mold are banished to Stranje House to be reformed into marriageable young ladies. Or so their parents think. In truth, Headmistress Emma Stranje, the original unusual girl, has plans for the young ladies—plans that entangle the girls in the dangerous world of spies, diplomacy, and war.

If you wear a false identity long enough, is it still false? What makes up one’s identity, anyway? When enough time has passed, don’t you become, at least partially, that which you were once only pretending to be?

The five books I’ve selected explore these questions—often in very roundabout ways. The obvious choice for this list would be spy books, but I’ve only included one of those. The rest are fantasy, historical and science fiction.

We discover, working through the list, that sometimes a false identity is truly false, sometimes it becomes real, and sometimes it hovers in the gray area in between.

Before he’ll be rescuing his abducted mother from Lovecraftian horrors in Harrison Squared, plucky young protagonist Harrison Harrison... will die? That’s for you to decide, as you play your way through Harrison Squared Dies Early, an interactive companion story to Daryl Gregory’s new novel.

Mission briefing. We open in the north African desert in 8000 B.C. A giant pyramid-shaped spaceship lands, scaring the crap out of the loincloth-dressed humans—except for one who approaches the ship.

Cut to a dig in the same region in 1928. The head of the dig, Dr. Langford, arrives with his daughter Catherine to make an amazing discovery: a giant ring. They find some kind of fossil under it.

Cut to the present day. Dr. Daniel Jackson is giving a lecture on the subject of the pyramids. He theorizes that the pyramids were built long before they were believed to have been erected. His theory is considered laughable, and everyone walks out on him after deriding his theory.

Not an author to dare wearing out his welcome in any one genre, Afterparty’s Daryl Gregory turns his attention to tentacles in Harrison Squared, a light-hearted Lovecraftian lark featuring a friendly fishboy and a ghastly artist which straddles the line between the silly and the sinister superbly.

It’s a novel named after its narrator, Harrison Harrison—to the power of five, in fact, but around his mom and his mates, just H2 will do. Whatever you want to call him—and you wouldn’t be the first to go with “weirdo”—Harrison has a paralysing fear of the sea. A hatred, even, and for good reason, because when our boy was a baby, his father—Harrison Harrison the fourth, of course—was swallowed by the waves, one dark day; a day Harrison has forgotten almost completely.

Afternoon Roundup brings you Interstellar’s darker alternate ending; an actor who will be virtually unrecognizable by the time he starts playing his Preacher character; and where to find the perfect guide to human sacrifice.

Where is Ferro? Are we going to see any more of her? At this point in the story it feels like we’ve really lost one of our primary characters. Last seen laughing at Jezal’s coronation, she doesn’t seem to have any further role to play. The Seed was never found, Logen has gone North, Bayaz told her to stay close, but for what?

She feels like a dangling loose end as we catapult toward a climax to the First Law Trilogy. I trust she’ll show back up and be significant. I think.

Welcome back to the Malazan Reread of the Fallen! Every post will start off with a summary of events, followed by reaction and commentary by your hosts Bill and Amanda (with Amanda, new to the series, going first), and finally comments from Tor.com readers. In this article, we’ll cover chapter nine ofIan Cameron Esslemont’s Orb Sceptre Throne.